Critic scores range from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating more favorable reviews.
Feels startlingly real and inherently relevant, a shining, sterling example of cinema at its most powerful and urgent. Read full review
Blending a surrealist perspective of battle-tinged faith with the harrowing tale of one girl's resilience, the film is a laser-focused fable threatened occasionally by its drifts into character shorthand, but equaled by a wrenching lead performance by Rachel Mwanza that results in one of the finest of the year. Read full review
The powerful things we expect from War Witch are as advertised, but what we don't expect is even better. Read full review
Brutality and tenderness are a potent mix in War Witch. Read full review
War Witch deals with a reality so horrific that the film’s touches of magical realism are welcome, even necessary — the only way to retain one’s bearings and sanity in a world without signposts. Read full review
It does a marvelous job at giving us an impressionistic taste of horrific circumstances without using them to beat us into submission. Read full review
The film’s subject is almost too horrible to contemplate, but it finds a way to space out the blows without softening them. Read full review
So is this a Western take on Africa? Yes, but Rebelle is full of such careful detail, and is carried so beautifully by Mwanza’s performance, that questions of authenticity slide away. Read full review
Managing to be neither sentimental nor sensationalistic, the film tells its story from the heart, and from the simple, straightforward viewpoint of young heroine Komona, warmly played by the talented Rachel Mwanza in her screen debut. Read full review
Though ostensibly a character study, it's nevertheless characterized by the vaguely moralizing tone of an issue film, one whose candor in the face of brutality seems calculated for maximum liberal appeal. Read full review